Friday, February 19, 2010

I finally got fed up with having to change the batteries in my wireless keyboard all the time so I broke down and bought a new wired keyboard for my Mac. This is my first experience with the new-style keyboards, and I have to say I'm in love. It's the smoothest typing experience I've ever had, and I've been hunting and pecking for a long time. (My first Apple was an Apple II Plus.) I decided to write the blog post mainly so I would have an excuse to do some more typing before I went to bed.

And I absolutely love OS X. Not just because it looks great, not just because it's unix under the hood, but because Cocoa is just a really well designed framework, and Objective C is a hell of a lot less painful to program in than C++. And of course, there's CCL.

But I absolutely hate Apple's heavy-handed approach to iPhone apps. Randomly pulling previously approved apps is more evil than anything Microsoft has ever done, and that is saying something. And not just because they can arbitrarily deprive a hard working coder of their livelihood, but because they seem to be determined to turn the app store into some kind of puritanical Disneyland.

I hate censorship. It's un-American. And I hate Apple for engaging in it.

5 comments:

(Was going to reply to your teabaggers sneer that there are a lot of us in the country (yes, even Harvard-educated CS folks) who are fed up with our Leviathan government, but, naahhh...)

They're even better than the MacBook Pro keyboards, which I also love.

(And I'm a keyboard snob--I grew up in the late 70's on the MIT AI Lab "Tom Knight" keyboards (and successors), the most deluxe/delicious hardware ever made for turning finger movements into electrical impluses. Never found anything as good, but these new short-throw Apple keyboards are really up there.)

Because they want me to pay admission to enter. Don't get me wrong, Apple has an absolute right to do what they are doing (unlike Microsoft, which actually broke the law back in the day). But that doesn't mean I have to like it. Not everything that is evil is illegal (which is also as it should be). And as long as they want me as a customer I have a right to express my opinion about the product. (BTW, if the government ever tried to force Apple to change their policy I'd be first in line to walk the picket lines in protest. I may not agree with what Apple does, but I will defend to the death their right to do it.)

And BTW, being fed up with leviathan government and being a tea bagger are not the same thing. The tea baggers have a very broad right-wingnut agenda, including eviscerating the first amendment separation of church and state, getting creationism taught in science classes, banning gay marriage and abortion, and, I might add, increasing the size of government provided the government employees in question are carrying weapons.

> Yes, many of them believe in the traditional definition of marriage and are anti-abortion. I think those are entirely reasonable positions, even from a non-religious (natural law) point of view.

Those who invoke the term "natural law" in support of anti-gay and anti-abortion positions don't know much about nature. Homosexuality is very common in nature, as is spontaneous abortion a.k.a. miscarriage. The term "natural law" as it is used in right-wing politics is just whitewash for ignorance at best and bigotry at worst. There is no rational nor moral basis for opposing gay marriage. It is bigotry pure and simple. The abortion issue is nowhere near as clear-cut, but under no circumstances can you argue against abortion on the basis of anything called "natural law" without twisting the meanings of the words "natural" and "law" well beyond their breaking point.